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Saturday, January 31, 2015

I am fascinated by the process the caterpillar goes through to become the delicate and vibrantly beautiful butterfly. Last year we had a picnic table full of Monarch caterpillars and I just found two large caterpillars in the swannplant today. I have done butterflies in quite a few art pieces before. Painted, woodburned, drawn. I'll share a couple of images with you here{below} the photo up ↑ is a detail of a commission piece I am working one at the moment and I decided today to add 3 butterflies....happy I did, love them :)

Previous works ↓

"The Monarch Log" - an all around woodburned and painted wood log - sold -

I
started writing of course,just with a colored pencil (Polychromos)then I used Pan pastels for the background with some diluted gesso and then I took my new Sennellier oil pastels (I got 2 boxes as a Christmas gift, yay !) for the friends' faces. Played some with marksall pencil and more gesso for the speech bubbles. A fun spread, lots of fun creating ;)

I
started messing about a little with watercolors and made the little colorwheel on the left. Ended up covering most of all of it again with gesso except for the wheel and then dropped the three primary colors and covered the spread using a palette knife, some stenciling and then I found her...

I started rolling white gesso on the papers with a brayer, then stained with inks and used some stencils too. The Angel is an overpainted collage cut from a magazine. Then I wrote stuff "away" from me and used stamps, more gesso, plaster, Golden paints, pencils . Whatever came into reach...

Sometimes your only available transportation is a leap of Faith- M. Shephard

Here is that other journal page I did this week. There are houses still, there's also an Angel again, where the leap of Faith fits in I have no idea myself, my journal pages just happen and I don't always know why or how. It's the fist page in the {almost} square book I made and showed in my last post.

For collage papers I used ledger papers, a selection of script papers, then gesso and inks and watersoluable oil pastels, soft pastels, marksall pencil, silver and gold paint and probably some other things just here and there. When journaling like this I grab whatever my hands can find. It just happens without me thinking much. Needless to say, I have no problem with the blank page, I lost that fear quite some time ago, I just go for it, take that leap of Faith with ease.

Wednesday, January 21, 2015

I have been (and still am) making quite a few journals lately and also been journaling. I seem to do that more when my mind is not at ease. I have houses on my mind in a bad way {we have to find a new place again} so this is one of the journal spreads that came out from this. I have more, just made a new journal too, a little different with uneven pages.

Saturday, January 17, 2015

Still had to adjust the size to fir her head, but I think it looks beautiful.

This
Santos took a while to finish and I will do some things differently
again next time around. I sculpted the body and the head with homemade
paper clay and made jointed arms as well {well they could be a lot
better, next time I will do this in a different way for sure} For the
cage part I used twigs from our garden and a driftwood piece I found at
the beach for the stand. Her wings were white wings to begin with, I
aged them with my own patina recipe and after painting the doll I gave
her a complete crackle finish which I grunged up a bit too. So she had
been waiting for a nice crown for quite some time and finally I got this
one. Happy, happy ! It makes her look so royal, what do you think ?

Wednesday, January 7, 2015

Time off a little to spend with the kids (it's summer holiday
here now)

and with my parents (who are over to visit)

Time to sleep in a
little (all though I have tons of prep work to do for the new school
term)

time to go to the beach, or to just "hang"

To do all the things I
would love to do when I don't have the time while work is full on.

Alas, I probably do not have enough time to do everything I have on my
to-do list, but that's not new. I do have this awesome hourglass though -
one of my gorgeous Christmas presents - and the little bird keeping the strand(s of time) "Hope", the painting I made at the end of last year is holding a very similar hourglass. These kind of things make me feel grateful and blessed.

Friday, January 2, 2015

Happy New Year to all my blog readers ! I really appreciate your visits.
This year I will start to blog a bit more again. Will keep you up to date with all my new plans and projects. I have quite a few in store, so keep posted :)